


Angels Still Have Faces

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: times seven [3]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Sephiroth Attempts To Be A Good Bro, Somehow, Sort Of, Suicide mention, Time Travel, What else is new, and ordering pizza, discussion of war crimes, genesis shut up, his methods involve issuing sensible commands, of course, outsider pov, potted plant logistics, sephiroth has no idea what's going on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-02-23 22:45:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13200147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: On the fourth day, Sephiroth looked out a window and spotted his two friends together on one of the outdoor training fields, once again exchanging harsh words, only forAngealto wheel around and storm off at the end.





	1. What Did You Do In The War?

**Author's Note:**

> New story for the new year! Or something. I still haven't abandoned anything. ^^ Title taken from a Sonata Arctica song about PTSD.

Sephiroth wasn’t sure how long it had been going on before he noticed it. Could have been weeks.

Could have been that the day he first noticed Angeal running his hand over a perfectly ordinary steel banister with the same reverent attention he’d been known to pay his father’s sword was the first day these behavioral tics began.

Even then, he couldn’t exactly say he’d _noticed_ at first. Merely observed. Observed that his friend’s mood had grown more thoughtful of late. That Angeal was paying more attention to things he had taken for granted, which was already far fewer things than Sephiroth or Genesis. That he’d developed a tendency to turn his face up to the sun and fill his lungs to their fullest capacity when out of doors.

He _noticed_ , in the sense of taking note, once he realized Angeal was arguing with Genesis.

They disagreed all the time, of course—his two friends had very different ideas about what was important. But they didn’t… _fight._ Even when one of them seemed really annoyed, or even both, the next time he saw them it was always as though the spat had never happened.

He’d always assumed the sort of communication involved in this dynamic required having known one another from shortly past infancy, and tried not to consider it a shortcoming of his own, that he could not begin to understand it.

But now they had had a disagreement sometime around the beginning of the week, and it wasn’t over the next time he saw them. In fact, he did not see them together for days in a row—which was not unusual, even now that the War had shifted to a passive footing and all three of them were in Midgar together much of the time—until on the fourth day, looking out a second-floor window, he spotted them together on one of the outdoor training fields once again exchanging harsh words, only for _Angeal_ to wheel around and storm off at the end.

It was less dramatic than a Genesis storm, but his back was stiff and his heels hit the pavement with a pointed sort of rage, and Genesis stared after him almost as baffled as Sephiroth felt.

Genesis was still on the training court when Sephiroth got down to him, and accepted an offer for a spar, but he was both more aggressive and less focused than usual, and curled his lip when Sephiroth asked about the argument. _Ripples form on the water’s surface._ It was none of his business, apparently.

It _was_ none of his business. That didn’t stop him from being—interested.

* * *

The mess hall at Shinra headquarters was technically designated a cafeteria, the one for ‘security personnel,’ but the troops and SOLDIERs who had spent time at the front all persisted in referring to it as the mess. Sephiroth didn’t visit it very often, and even more rarely stayed to eat rather than grabbing a sealed drink and a plastic-wrapped sandwich and carrying them elsewhere, but when he did he always got a table to himself.

On occasions like this one, when the room was not especially crowded—it was three in the afternoon, relatively few non-SOLDIER military personnel were free who did not have the whole day to themselves, and relatively few troops on leave stayed in the building instead of visiting the attractions of Midgar—he tended to get a table to himself, surrounded by other empty tables. He had a _very_ good forbidding expression. He had been developing it since he was ten years old.

He was sitting close against the wall, both because it was always better to have something solid at your back and because it lowered the number of tables adjacent to his and raised the odds of being left entirely alone—people at adjoining tables made him look more approachable to his juniors in SOLDIER, overenthusiastic cadets, and troopers on dares—as he ate his way through a large portion of the day’s lunch.

Cafeteria food was generally better than what they got at the front, if only because more of the ingredients were fresh, but there was a particular baked noodle _thing_ one of the cooks they’d had on campaign had introduced to the mess tent, that had been one of the only remotely pleasant eating experiences they ever got out there. Asked for his secret, the cook had reportedly said that it was a peasant recipe _designed_ to be cheap and filling, rather than an inferior version of rich people food like most of their menu. The man had recently been transferred to Shinra tower, and Sephiroth was perhaps indulging in a bit of nostalgia.

He knew without looking up that the body intruding into his space was Angeal, even before his friend slid a tray onto the circular table two seats to his left, and sat down. Angeal hadn’t taken any of the noodle stuff, he just had applesauce, cheese, and a cup of tar-black coffee. When Sephiroth glanced up at his face, he looked like he _needed_ the coffee.

“Afternoon,” said Angeal.

“Hello,” Sephiroth agreed. “How was your mission?”

Angeal shrugged. “Tedious. But nobody died, and we cleared out the infestation. So a success.” He seemed cheerful about it, but the disinterest also seemed real. He fiddled with his spoon. He wasn’t wearing gloves. He hadn’t worn them in weeks. “How was your inspirational speech?”

“It went fine.” Sephiroth was actually fairly good at talking at length when he had cause, something that surprised a lot of people who listened to him converse first.

His speeches naturally took the form of lectures, but he’d taken note of other people’s most effective communicating strategies over the past few years, and thought the addition of more dramatic language and short, vaguely optimistic sentences had improved his performance. SOLDIER was as much a propaganda unit as a combat one, after all, and even before he’d become definitively Shinra’s strongest SOLDIER he’d been used in publicity work, because he photographed well. Giving intentionally bad speeches, he had learned early on, merely meant they made him memorize speeches other people had written for him, which was much worse.

“Do you think we’ll be sent back to Wutai soon?” Angeal asked. The pleasant blandness was beginning to seem forced.

“I hope not,” Sephiroth said frankly. “The men need time to recover.”

“Don’t we all,” said Angeal, biting into his lump of cheese. He chewed it slowly, as though deeply contemplating the combination of salt, fat, and faint sharpness that was cheap white cafeteria cheese.

“Angeal,” said Sephiroth, “are you leading up to something.”

A startled, abortive laugh, deferred in favor of swallowing cheese rather than spraying it across the table. “I’m not subtle, am I.” He scooped up a spoonful of apple sauce, placed the whole thing in his mouth, and pulled it free between his closed lips, keeping all the applesauce inside. His throat worked. He let out a voiceless sigh, and put the spoon down. Pushed his tray back as though abruptly revolted by the idea of food, or maybe just making space to lay his hands on the artificial wood surface of the table.

“Have you ever,” Angeal asked, in a low voice that managed to avoid sounding _hushed_ through its sheer evenness, “had to kill civilians? Or have men under your command do it?”

Sephiroth looked sharply at him, wondering if this was the source of the strangeness somehow. If Angeal had had to do such a thing for the first time only recently, and…but it had been weeks since he returned from his last deployment, and anyway why would that make him act so grateful to be alive? Why would it make him fight with Genesis? “…I have.”

“In the war?”

“Where else?” Sometimes after Shinra took a region, guerilla activity in the area would spike, and the Turks would trace it to a local population that was supporting the insurgents.

Early in the war, after their first burst of success had died down and the advance slowed, Sephiroth had done much of his early service hunting rogue ninjas behind the front lines, on the grounds that his speed was useful for it, while his size at the time had been impractical at the front. There had been more than one instance of executing collaborators. Department policy was exacting.

Angeal shrugged. As if Sephiroth might have had any number of occasions to slaughter noncombatants, and he hadn’t wished to make assumptions. “How did you feel about it?”

“…did HR put you up to this?” Not that they had any particular record of hounding him about his mental health, but they were known for enlisting people’s friends to pry into their business, and Angeal trusted authority most of the three of them, and would thus make the most likely patsy.

Angeal’s shoulders shook with another startled laugh. “What? No. It’s…” Grave again. “It’s related to my argument with Genesis. There aren’t that many Firsts to compare notes with, you know, and fewer I’d feel comfortable asking.”

Using Sephiroth as an emotional baseline was certainly an unheard-of resort, which did signal desperation. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

Angeal’s face did something strange, an understated grimace maybe. His eyes had drifted to his hands. They’d folded themselves together on the table. It was an uncharacteristic gesture, somehow. “It was different from killing enemy soldiers who had no chance against you, right?”

Sephiroth tipped his head. It certainly _was_ different, but he was not sure just how. Attacking enemies who posed almost no threat required only slightly more alertness than watching to see that an execution was not interrupted, and killing enemies as they fled was more challenging only inasmuch as it required either running after them, or target practice.

When you went into a village and your men dragged people out of their houses, the organized nature of the activity made it unlike battle. Even the greatest commander was never really _in control_ of a battle. The pleading, the cursing, the single sharp gunshots spaced even seconds apart—the gleaming shuriken flashing toward your exposed neck as you turned your face away….

Well, you were never _totally_ in control of anything. Whatever Hojo thought.

“It was,” he affirmed, after too long a pause. Returned to Angeal’s original question. “How did it feel, hm.” He still wasn’t the best person to ask, but Angeal had already explained why he was the only option, and he did want to give his best effort.

Cupped his hands around his tea, then looking down at them recognized the gesture as the Wutaian method of holding a teacup, adapted around the handle of the Eastern-style mug, and unfolded them again. “Disgusting,” he said at last.

He’d never really thought about it before, because thinking about emotions was never useful and this one had not forced itself to his attention, but now that he had, the feeling associated with those memories…more than anything shared the same character as listening to Hojo gloat, or having to visit the sewers in the course of a monster hunt.

Angeal nodded slowly. Sephiroth still couldn’t quite read his expression—he was always harder to read than Genesis, who might not always emote _sincerely_ but at least did it with enough emphasis that it was usually clear what he meant. Angeal was only unambiguous when he laughed, and even then there were sometimes layers, especially if he was laughing at one of his own jokes.

There was a pinch at the corners of his eyes, now. “You didn’t want to.”

Sephiroth shrugged. “That isn’t a useful consideration at war.”

“Isn’t it?” Angeal’s eyes dropped back to his coffee, which he swirled in the cup, watching it lap against the white-glazed crockery and run back down, leaving only the faintest trace of itself. “I guess I usually did think about whether something would be dishonorable, rather than if I _wanted_ to do it,” he admitted. “I’ve never been faced with…that.”

Sephiroth was surprised to feel one line of tension along his spine unbind. “Good.”

When Angeal had been a Second, he’d spent a short while under Sephiroth’s direct command, and now he thought about it Angeal was one of the ones he’d never considered putting into such a rotation. He’d kept him on the battlefield, facing equal odds against canny defending armies, and let other officers engage in the dirty work of securing the rear. It seemed other commanders since had all concurred.

Angeal had looked up sharply at that one word, but his expression didn’t seem angry, nor did he look like he had figured out that Sephiroth had kept him out of such things on purpose.

For a second it seemed he would say something, eyeing Sephiroth’s expression, but then his gaze dropped again. He reached blindly for his coffee, and took a sip. “Genesis doesn’t…I don’t think he _enjoys_ it, exactly, but he likes even less doing things he dislikes, so when he’s had to kill civilians he makes it into a—a story, where they’re wicked conspirators who deserve what’s coming to them, and he’s justice, and there’s no reason to feel bad.”

Sephiroth…could see that very easily, now Angeal had described it. Genesis building a narrative around this brutal act of war so that it was a literary drama, one that made him righteous as well as powerful. It probably did help. If Sephiroth had had half as much imagination as Genesis he might have done something similar himself.

Angeal’s hand tightened around his mug. “And feeling good about what he’s doing means he gets…carried away. He wiped out two whole villages last year, when he was just supposed to question them all and kill the ringleaders. I only just heard about it.”

Sephiroth had wiped out a village once when he was sixteen. Not because he was carried away, though. He’d been on a mission to make an example. “You’re angry that he doesn’t regret it.”

“ _He’s_ angry that I think he did something wrong.” Angeal’s lips pressed together. They were always less visible than Genesis’, being nearly the same color as the rest of his face, but it still looked odd when they vanished altogether. His knuckles were white.

“It isn’t that any of us are innocent," he said quietly, "but what is our pride worth if our honor depends on calling whatever we do ‘right,’ instead of trying to find the right thing to do.”

Sephiroth shook his head. His pride was worth a lot to him, but he was never sure if he understood what Angeal meant by _honor._ Genesis had once said uncharitably that neither did Angeal.

“He won’t _listen_ to me!” The words burst out between clenched teeth, slightly louder than the rest of the conversation had been, and Angeal’s cup _cracked_ sharply in his hand, and suddenly there was coffee spreading over the table and spattered over both their faces, and Angeal was holding a fistful of pottery shards that was beginning to ooze blood into the base of the mug, which had fallen onto the tabletop still containing a few milliliters of coffee.

Angeal’s expression was blank-faced shock, and Sephiroth was torn between concern and the urge to burst out laughing, and as usual compromised by showing nothing at all.

He blinked hard, then leaned forward to pluck the stack of paper napkins from their holder in the middle of the table and begin dropping them in the spill before it could start to drain onto the floor or into their laps, except for the one he used to blot the coffee spray from his own face and chest. Angeal took his coffee with sugar. He was going to need to wash his hair tonight. “Put those down,” he ordered Angeal, because two seconds was quite long enough to be dazed in the middle of the mess hall with people watching.

“Open your hand and stop holding onto the pieces,” he repeated, when there was no immediate response.

Honestly, Angeal was a grown SOLDIER, he’d been First for years, this kind of accident usually only happened to new members of the Department. “Carefully. And then get to Medical so someone with tweezers can make sure you don’t heal with any fragments in your hand to damage your tendons.”

Tendon injuries were the _worst;_ healing magic could fix almost anything else with no worse than a faint lingering ache—mended bones were often stronger than before—but even magic never entirely restored a tendon or ligament to its pristine state once it was cut or torn.

The oldest SOLDIERs these days were just turning forty, and while their visible aging was if anything behind the curve of the standard population—except the ones with baldness in their families, that was proceeding apace—there were complaints of deep aching, and a few who had been especially cavalier with their joints in the overconfidence of youth were on the brink of applying for retirement on account of chronic pain. Angeal could not be allowed to permanently damage his dominant hand by coping badly with frustration.

Angeal lowered his hand to the table before opening it. Tipped the mess of shards out and looked blankly at the ones remaining, either embedded in his flesh or small enough to be glued by the welling blood. Shook himself. “I,” he said, and then his eyes focused again. “I, yes, you’re right. I apologize.”

“No need.” Sephiroth gestured toward the exit with a balled-up napkin half-soaked in coffee. “Go on.”

Soon after Angeal departed a cafeteria staffer hurried up to insist on cleaning the spill up properly, and since Sephiroth was neither invested in coffee mopping nor possessed of the proper equipment, he wordlessly moved his tray to an adjacent table. This transferred a small part of the coffee spill, but since these tables had to be wiped down regularly anyway, he doubted this did any harm.

He ate the rest of his lunch rapidly and without really tasting it, and left.


	2. Live The Nightmare Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've seen two hobbies listed for Angeal, gardening and photography. I did the thing where I was like 'how would that even work???' on the gardening and then I had a complicated explanation and it wound up in a story so it's a Thing now. ^^;

He dropped by Angeal’s office the next day, about twenty minutes after the computer system noted that his friend had checked in from another simple monster-hunting mission. Sure enough, the man was there reviewing the daily paperwork.

Even before Sephiroth made a noise, Angeal looked up. Something foreign flashed across his face before he quirked a wry smile and held up his open right hand for inspection. He _still_ wasn’t wearing gloves. Apparently his newfound desire to appreciate any and all possible textures trumped the value of protection even after an injury they could have prevented.

The searching look Angeal had given him yesterday, asking how it had _felt_ to oversee the execution of enemy civilians…that look had appeared a lot lately, now that he thought about it. What was he looking for? What was _Sephiroth_ looking for?

He asked, “The verdict?”

“Medical said I’ve been working too hard,” said Angeal.

“You have some leave stored up,” Sephiroth pointed out. He didn’t know this because he was a busybody, he knew this because Angeal _never took time off._ Even _he_ periodically indulged in spending two or three days straight not leaving his apartment, reading books in his pajamas and eating everything in his freezer. Angeal somehow managed to keep a small collection of houseplants alive using only his standard off-hours. Sephiroth had killed his last three gifts; one had been a cactus. “Why don’t you go visit your mother?”

The expression Angeal turned on him at this was—peculiar. Like some sort of admixture of spooked and…Sephiroth didn’t have a good word for it. Something soft. “Maybe I will,” he allowed.

He probably wouldn’t.

There was a mission to the Banora region later that week—just putting down Spirals that were breeding out of control, but the creatures were tough enough it wasn’t being offered to anyone below Second even in teams. Sephiroth e-mailed Angeal about it, got the message back, _Thanks._

He put it down as his good deed for the month, and applied himself to duty rosters for another hour before heading to the VR simulator room to see how many dragons he could convince it to give him.

* * *

 As it turned out, Sephiroth’s advice had been very bad. He should have known better than to expect otherwise.

In a way it was good Angeal had gone south as a mission, instead of on leave. If he hadn’t had a pickup scheduled he’d probably never have made it back. As it was, he got off the helicopter like a sleepwalker and made his way straight to his quarters in the SOLDIER barrack complex just outside the tower, blowing off his debrief which, even after a mission like this where it would be more of a check-in, was unheard-of for him, and didn’t come out again.

Sephiroth learned of this the next morning, when as Angeal’s sole superior officer he got an e-mail notifying him of this delinquency. Genesis never took protocol very seriously so if these e-mails had been paper they would have fed a merrily crackling fire by now, but this was only the second time the system had spat one out for Angeal.

Sometime around noon, Angeal called in sick.

When the standard workday ended, Sephiroth gave in to niggling uncertainty. Normally Angeal calling in sick after being out unexcused all morning would be merely an event. Something to tease him about after he got back on his feet, possibly—for Genesis, if not for Sephiroth. (He would admit he occasionally fed his most talkative friend a topic to take advantage of and then stood back to enjoy the verbal carnage.) But today…well.

Nothing had been normal about Angeal, lately.

There was no answer when he knocked. He tried his phone—heard the accompanying ringtone from the other side of the door. There was no further acknowledgment from within.

Either Angeal was deeply asleep, or he’d called in dishonestly sick and gone out somewhere without his PHS. Sephiroth found he urgently needed to know which.

If it had been Genesis, Sephiroth would have had to resort to breaking and entering. It wouldn’t have been terribly hard, though he might have had to compensate his friend’s landlord the cost of the door. But Angeal lived in company housing, part of the larger Shinra complex attached to the Tower, and as his exasperation mounted Sephiroth availed himself of one of the many sundry prerogatives scattered in his path as he climbed Shinra’s meaningless command chain, and punched in an override code that would open any door in the barracks.

The door beeped and slid open.

Angeal was sitting on his sofa. On the surface of it, this was normal; Angeal quite liked his sofa, and had been very pleased at the promotion that gained him quarters large enough to have one.

His hands were laced together between his knees, and he was looking in the direction of his television but not quite at it. It was not on. His shoulders bowed in. With perfect inward-turned stillness, he was still every bit the picture of desolation Genesis managed at his most dramatic, and then some.

He looked up. “Sephiroth,” he said. It could have been called toneless, but there _was_ a tone to it—a sort of flat surprise at identifying the intruder, strong enough it was as though he would have been less surprised had his visitor turned out to be a keypad-using chocobo.

Sephiroth stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Angeal wasn’t dying, but he clearly wasn’t well, either.

He was in full uniform, with mud on his boots. His PHS lay on the coffee table along with a literary magazine Genesis had subscribed him to, a weapons catalogue, and two pieces of junk mail. Also an empty mug. The space as a whole was still about as orderly as ever, and there was no way of knowing how long the mug had been there, but in context it seemed vaguely ominous.

“Did…your visit to your mother not go well?” Sephiroth asked. Because there were no visible physical symptoms, and he could not imagine anything that could have happened while killing giant heavily armoured arthropods could have provoked…this.

“She killed herself,” Angeal said, in a voice with no emotion at all in it.

To put the lie to that, he then burrowed into himself, as if he could hide from the words, shoulders rising around his face, and repeated, “She _killed herself._ Practically in front of me! I thought it would be fine this time. Because nothing happened yet. But she just. Poisoned her own tea. Because of me.”

“I…don’t see how it could be your fault,” Sephiroth ventured.

Angeal made a peculiar hissing sound through his teeth and didn’t answer.

For lack of anything better to do, Sephiroth sat down in the chair next to the sofa. Now that he knew Angeal was not dying or actively self-destructing, he should perhaps give him back his privacy—he had not, after all, been invited. But on the front lines in Wutai men who were grieving were never left alone until their squad was sure they were rational, and when this informal policy was neglected there was a distinct spike in mortality.

There were no obvious enemies in Midgar for Angeal to expose himself to recklessly, unless you counted low-level monsters, but it still seemed best to keep an eye on him. At least until he was asked to leave. At that point he could reevaluate.

They sat in silence for some time. Angeal only had a silent, digital clock and it was by his bed, but Sephiroth estimated about eighteen minutes.

“Why now?” Angeal asked quietly. It sounded like a very important question to him.

Sephiroth didn’t have an answer.

A few minutes after that, there was a knock on the door. Sephiroth began to stand, then considered that this was not his home. When he looked toward Angeal, he at least seemed aware of the noise, if not necessarily planning to do anything about it.

There was a second knock, then the visitor tried the knob. The door rattled for a second, and then the keypad beeped and Genesis let himself in. Whether he had Angeal’s personal code or had gotten hold of an override hardly mattered. He pulled up in surprise when he saw both Angeal looking up belatedly and Sephiroth twisting around in his seat to look at him.

“You _are_ here!” he blustered slightly. “Good. For all the documentation was showing, you might as well have dissolved into the aether. What happened?”

Angeal stared at his best friend for a few seconds. Of course Angeal and Genesis didn’t usually coddle each other, and Genesis had no idea yet that this was a special circumstance, requiring special delicacy. An expression curdled finally across Angeal’s impassive face—anguish, but also a strange and formless rage. Then he sighed, and looked away, and there was only weariness. “Mom’s dead,” he said. “Pull up a chair.”

The chair Sephiroth was sitting in was the only one with a cushion, and Genesis was forced to step into the next room and take one of the two hard-backed chairs that sat beside Angeal’s kitchen table. He pulled it up to the opposite end of the couch, and now he and Sephiroth were flanking Angeal’s position.

The plants weren’t looking very well, Sephiroth noticed. Had Angeal forgotten to water them? Or watered them too much? He himself had been guilty of both; even punctilious research into the needs of a species could not triumph over not truly caring about its survival.

At least once, he had done nothing scientifically wrong. _You have to repot them regularly,_ Angeal had told him. _Especially in the Midgar climate, no one’s sure why. I use potting soil imported from around Kalm, you just…be very careful with the roots…._ He’d demonstrated on one of his own, a thing of vines. By the look on his face as he separated the pathetic life-form very gently from its earth without harming the white underground tendrils, he found it a meditative experience. Sephiroth had been unable to muster that level of interest in his friend’s hobby. It had probably been a bad idea to express as much interest as he had; it was why he’d been given three separate opportunities to fail.

Watered correctly and permitted the right amount of sun, his potted hydrangea had gotten by for two months before withering away into black dust. This was apparently about average.

Had Angeal been ignoring his plants even before his mother’s suicide?

“What happened?” Genesis asked after waiting a surprisingly long time. “Miz Gillian…”

“…she never liked you,” Angeal observed detachedly. Genesis reared back, hurt flashing across his face. “But she was always kind to you, anyway. I thought she had something against your parents.” He raised his eyes, and a bitter sort of humor creased one cheek. “But it was always her, really.”

“…my friend, the fates are cruel…”

Angeal closed his eyes. Sephiroth had never seen him seem so tired. “They are, aren’t they.”

That seemed to put an end to the conversation. The three of them sat there, in strangling silence—Sephiroth wanted to leave; Angeal wouldn’t be alone anymore so his duty was complete. But getting up and going would draw his friends’ attention in a way he did not think he could bear just now, so he sat. Angeal was looking at the ceiling now instead. Genesis was contemplating the cover of the catalogue. Sephiroth was fairly sure he didn’t actually have an interest in a ‘rotating double magazine for twice the firing power.’

(It also sounded like something that was bound to get fouled up and become useless in actual field conditions. It was amazing just how much of Shinra’s advanced technology was no use at all in reality.)

After about ten minutes, Angeal’s phone started ringing again. There were only so many people who had this number; most SOLDIERs kept in touch through e-mails and Angeal while fairly friendly in person wasn’t gregarious enough to hand his number out easily. Genesis was here, so it was probably an official communication. After several rings Genesis stirred uncomfortably. “Are you going to answer that?”

“No.”

“Ripples form on the water’s surface,” Genesis mumbled, and settled back again. Sephiroth was used to his using _Loveless_ as a sort of punctuation, but this was the least dramatic delivery he’d ever heard from him. He found this even more unsettling than Sephiroth did, apparently. Well, he _did_ have even less information, and he’d known the deceased.

Angeal’s PHS kept going off; Angeal kept ignoring it. Finally Genesis picked it up and flipped it open. “Ah,” he said, scrolling through missed call notifications, then messages. “It’s Hollander. He’s heard you’re unwell and wants you to come by for a checkup. Quite vociferously, actually.” He looked up from the tiny screen. “You know how I detest being poked and prodded so normally I would endorse your newfound talent for truancy, but honestly a medical intervention seems called-for.”

“If that man comes near me, I’ll kill him.”

This pronouncement was delivered in very nearly Angeal’s usual level voice with its usual firm emphasis, with that precise delivery he used to project special sincerity, but there was an extra strand of pure poison that Sephiroth had never heard before, and did not like.

He respected the sentiment, though, even if it wasn’t very practical.

Genesis’s eyebrows drew together, almost enough to wrinkle his brow. “ _My friend, do you fly away now?_ ”

Angeal snorted, as if at some obscure joke. “I’m not going to see Hollander.”

It wasn’t as if Angeal was actually _ill._ He didn’t need a doctor just now. “I’ll inform him of the situation,” said Sephiroth.

Angeal frowned, but nodded.

He was eligible for a week of compassionate leave for his mother’s death so long as he wasn’t reassigned to the front; Sephiroth would put the paperwork through once he got back to his office. For now he took out his own phone and tapped out a brief e-mail to Hollander to the effect that Angeal’s health was acceptable, but his mother was dead. He did not require a doctor, just some time off.

“How do you deal with Hojo?” Angeal was asking him suddenly, and Sephiroth blinked at his friend, caught off-balance. Flipped his phone shut a little uncertainly.

“I avoid him as much as possible,” he responded with only a little delay.

“See?” Angeal said to Genesis.

Genesis waved an irritable hand toward Sephiroth. “Do you seriously mean to suggest that _he_ is an appropriate model for solving _any_ social dilemma?”

“He offends fewer people than you do,” Angeal pointed out, and almost sounded like his usual self. Genesis looked offended. Well, so was Sephiroth. No, he was hardly the most competent social operative, but that didn’t make him utterly incompetent, and avoiding Hojo had always worked _quite_ well for him.

Except when it hadn’t, but unpleasant things _happened_ occasionally. It was merely a matter of minimizing risk factors.

“What, did you conduct a survey?”

“Heh. I’ve been cleaning up your messes for almost twenty years, Gen. Not that I don’t make messes of my own, but…” Angeal shook his head, and it was fond, it _was_ —mingled with exasperation in the way Angeal frequently did. But there was sorrow there, or Sephiroth thought there was, and almost definitely anger, and Genesis’ face bent again as it had at the comment about Gillian disliking him.

Then his mouth drew tight. “You’re different.”

Angeal gave him a sour look, lips thin. “I’m _grieving._ ”

“No, you’ve been weird for weeks,” stated Genesis, and Sephiroth took a moment to glare at him too, because even _he_ knew this was not the right time to pursue a longstanding argument. “ _Quietly, but surely._ You can’t tell me this was all about _peacekeeping actions_ taken _years_ ago. There is simply no way you didn’t know these things were going on, even if you kept out of them.”

“…I didn’t want to know,” Angeal admitted, the words dragged out of him. Sephiroth studiously contemplated a tiny somewhat shriveled cactus with a red top. “So I didn’t. What kind of honor is that? We’ve always been making sacrifices to our dreams.”

“Yes,” snapped Genesis. “That is how it _works!_ ”

Sephiroth’s head snapped back around, and he stood. “That’s it. Out.”

Genesis’ eyes widened for a moment, and then he seemed to decide he couldn’t mean it. “ _My friend, the fates are cruel._ If you want your dreams to come true, you can’t expect the world to just _reward your princip—ack._ ”

Sephiroth had grabbed his smaller friend by the back of the collar and was dragging him out the door. He probably wouldn’t have made it if the room had been larger, or Angeal had decided to have his breakdown in bed, meaning there would have been two rooms to get through, but Sephiroth outweighed Genesis and had surprise on his side, and they were already most of the way into the hallway before Genesis thought to snatch at Angeal’s doorframe, then grab for his captor’s wrist.

Sephiroth jerked the door shut behind them and only then let go. He might not know what he was doing, but he was able to identify _being completely non-constructive._ “No,” he said firmly.

“ _No?_ ” demanded Genesis, as if sufficient outrage might change Sephiroth’s mind.

“No,” he repeated. “His mother is dead. You will not…harass him. Your hurt feelings are not important. This is _not the time._ ”

Genesis looked mutinous. He knew Sephiroth was right, but he did not accept being dictated to.  “Your military authority doesn’t extend to Angeal’s apartment, _General._ ”

“Gillian Hewley killed herself,” said Sephiroth flatly.

Genesis’ eyes widened fractionally. Narrowed again, and he looked sharply away, gazing into the surface of Angeal's next door neighbor's nameplate as though it were the distance.

“ _Even if the morrow is barren of promises, nothing shall forestall my return._ ” With that, he swept away down the hall, radiating resentment.  Hopefully he would return contrite.

Or at least willing to wait until the worst of Angeal’s grief had passed to address his resentment over whatever Angeal’s problems were with Shinra’s wartime policies.

* * *

Angeal looked up again, when Sephiroth went back inside. “He left?” he asked, in disappointment and resignation and relief—one of those, or all of them, Sephiroth couldn’t be sure.

He nodded, and shut the door behind him.

Angeal’s sword was in its stand beside the door. Sephiroth’s first instinct was to pick it up and offer it to him, as a comfort, but he might not want it now. It was a symbol of his family, but it was his mother that had hurt him. It was a symbol of his strength, but he was wracked with some sort of pain over the war, even if this specific blade had not been wetted with Wutaian blood. Sephiroth held position, and did not approach either weapon or wielder.

Dark eyes followed his gaze to it anyway. “I just keep thinking the same thing over again,” Angeal said.

“What.”

“‘Angels only have one dream.’”

That was all. Sephiroth waited, but that was all. He didn’t recognize the quotation. Angeal didn’t offer to explain. His gaze drifted away again, to settle on the off-white surface of the opposite wall.

The plants were wilting, the television was not on, and the PHS had stopped buzzing. There was mud on Angeal’s boots and dust on the coffee table, and suddenly Sephiroth felt too large for this space, despite its actual inhabitant outweighing him by some twenty pounds and being only slightly shorter, felt his limbs protruding intrusively in every direction and the still air rasping against his bones. Self-consciously, he brought his elbows in, and drew his right foot close beside his left.

As if that could possibly help with the fact that he had barged in here without invitation and taken it upon himself to throw Angeal’s closest friend out.

Summoning his sword would make the situation worse.

He moved forward, took up his place in the only comfortable chair again, though he didn’t bother trying to make himself comfortable this time. He rested his weight near the edge of the chair, and leaned forward over his own knees—the furniture was standard issue, and thus rather too short for either of them.

“Angeal,” Sephiroth asked. “What is the angels’ dream?”

The look Angeal turned on him now was so heavy and so sad it almost looked like pity. “To be human.”

That was all he would say on the matter.


	3. Deeds Devils Would Abhor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Btw I know Gillian was actually a researcher, not an assistant, but so was Lucrecia and yet we originally hear of her as a lab assistant. I feel like there's a correlation between 'younger female researcher whose body is used as experimental material & who receives no credit' and people recalling you as your husband/partner's assistant. 
> 
> (Also I headcanon Gillian did her postgrad as a Shinra intern, which is what I assume a lot of the gray suits are--I mean, he's called _Professor_ Hojo, that's a title usually attached to at least a conceptual teaching role.)

Sephiroth really didn’t feel he could leave, especially now that he’d driven Genesis off, but it wasn’t as if he knew what he was doing. Sitting in silence was clearly inadequate, however—not only was he doing nothing productive, it was _unpleasant._ For both of them, probably.

Angeal had already been sitting on his sofa for hours before Sephiroth got here, and it was clearly unhealthy.

Enough of this. In a situation that needed dealing with, he _had_ an applicable skillset: he took command. To his surprise, it seemed to work.

He insisted that Angeal go have a shower, not because he had had time to get really filthy—the Spiral fight before he’d stopped by his mother’s house and watched her inexplicably die of tea had left only a few marks—but because it was a resort of his own in times of stress, which he’d overheard both SOLDIERs and troopers refer to needing, suggesting his own experience had more general application. He’d read about psychological benefits to the act of cleansing. It was a _logical_ suggestion.

When Angeal came out again, Sephiroth had food laid out. Wutaian takeout was ironically a staple of order-in Midgar dining and Genesis and Angeal had long since identified the best Southern Islands restaurant in Midgar that delivered, but under the circumstances Sephiroth had avoided both, and instead ordered a sort of Corelian flatbread dish that was baked covered in boiled fruit, cheese, and cured meats, and which was lately becoming popular.

Mostly because he’d inadvertently memorized the number to the delivery place due to its persistent advertising jingle.

When the shower shut off, Sephiroth was just setting down two of Angeal’s plates—he’d paid for this food, he was eating some—on the coffee table, and the bathroom door opened on his frowning attempts to remove one of the wedges the flatbread had arrived cut into onto a plate, without losing all the baked-on foodstuffs on top. The cheese seemed intended to serve as a sort of glue, but it would rather adhere to itself than the bread, mostly because of the layer of salted jam laid, he felt unwisely, between them. This really required some sort of flat serving device, as was used for pie. Angeal stood in the doorway watching him for several seconds, hair dripping onto the cheap carpet.

“You’re supposed to use your hands,” he said after a while, and he was smiling the way he often did when Sephiroth was inadvertently ridiculous, but even this was sad.

Sephiroth set down the unhelpful fork and transferred his frown to his black leather gloves. “Take them off,” Angeal advised, finally stepping out of the door frame, and turning toward his bedroom. “They’ll get greasy. I’m going to put some pants on.”

While Sephiroth wouldn’t have objected if Angeal had chosen to make up for his fast in nothing but a white towel around his waist, he concurred that it usually seemed easier to face the world with pants.

The towel had been transferred to Angeal’s head when he came out again, pants on—they were blue and probably meant for sleeping in, not part of his uniform—to sit down beside a plate full of only slightly mangled Corelian flatbread. “I don’t really have an appetite,” he said, even as he balanced the plate on his knees.

“Eat anyway,” Sephiroth directed, as he had often been directed in his childhood. He had been _much_ better-treated than Hojo’s other long-term specimens, but even very small mako injections threw the body into internal confusion and distress, so he had often been indifferent to eating.

Two of the lab assistants, one of the only women Hojo had accepted as a trainee and a man with several younger siblings, had hit upon the idea of bringing him more interesting food to ease their work of keeping him nourished. Hojo had terminated their internships when he noticed, for disrupting his healthy balanced diet. “You…need the strength.”

He’d wanted that sentence to sound kind; suspected all he had sounded was uncertain. But Angeal picked up the wedge of flatbread and bit into it.

Sephiroth would have felt more naked without his gloves, if Angeal hadn’t been literally half naked. He took a careful bite of his own flatbread.

It wasn’t bad. Definitely greasy. Definitely transferring some of that grease to his hands. Hojo would be appalled at the amount of salt. He took the next bite after that thought vengefully.

Angeal seemed to be recovering his appetite nicely as he went, proving that whatever condition his heart was in, his stomach was determined to survive.

“I’m sorry,” Sephiroth said, when enough food was gone that Angeal should be secure from any significant physical deterioration for several days. “About sending you to see your mother. I thought she would help.”

That was what mothers were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Watch over their offspring like brooding griffins. He’d sometimes thought, as a small child, that if his own had survived she might have interceded to soften Hojo’s strict standards, or kept Professor Gast from going away and dying, though the latter idea was illogical in the extreme.

Angeal shrugged a little. “Easy mistake to make. So did I.”

He let his breath out in a sigh, but the distress seemed less crushing than what had gone before. The food or the shower had helped. “I…should have known better, I guess. But she was my mother. She loved me.” One hand tightened into a fist, and the other shoved the final end of a crust of flatbread into his mouth and out of sight.

He’d gone to her for help, and she’d hurt him. That probably hadn’t been her reason—Sephiroth was hardly an expert in suicide, but he associated it mainly with an escape from unbearable pain, so he presumed Gillian Hewley had merely been too preoccupied with her own suffering to take her son’s into account.

Uncharitably, he was determined to hold it against her. She had not been his friend. Angeal was.

“I’m sorry,” Sephiroth said again.

Angeal shrugged again. Reached up and pulled the sodden white towel off his head, so his hair fell down around his ears in messy clumps, and dropped it on the sofa. Sephiroth tried not to be distracted from the serious conversation by the wet patch this created on the upholstery; that was ridiculous, it was Angeal’s sofa to treat as he wished. “It’s not your fault. You had a good idea. Mom just…”

He shook his head, and seemed likely to drift into abstraction again. That wouldn’t do. He needed to be distracted.

“What was wrong?” Sephiroth asked. It was not what a good friend would do, perhaps, prying instead of letting Angeal speak in his own time, but curiosity had been gnawing him for weeks, and at least he hadn’t made an accusation of it. And Angeal’s mother certainly hadn’t helped with whatever it was. He’d gained a full new set of burdens. “Before.”

“I had a…dream,” Angeal admitted unwillingly. “The three of us were all…monsters. Genesis killed everyone in Banora. You killed…a small town, and later Midgar.”

That stung. It was one thing to be the strongest, he _knew_ that concept balanced on the knife’s-edge of ‘most monstrous,’ but he didn’t expect to hear that from his close peers. “And you?” Sephiroth asked. Partly because he’d heard that this sort of talk was meant to get poison out, and the most painful part was therefore probably important to speak, but just as much he hoped to cushion his own discomfort at this _dream_ with more detail.

Angeal snorted. “Oh, I didn’t kill anybody. Even myself. I made Zack do it.”

“Zack?”

“A promising young SOLDIER I’d mentored.” A shrug. “He found me with Mom’s body, and after what Genesis had done, he thought…” The pain, the _shame,_ was muted, but visible. Sephiroth had never thought Angeal the type to take a dream so seriously. But then, his mother had just reenacted one of the most wrenching parts of it in a disturbing manner.

That…wouldn’t account for the last few weeks, of course. For the effect this dream had evidently had. “You told your mother about this dream?”

“Not even that, really. Well, not all the details. I mostly talked to her about…well. Genesis and I….” Angeal trailed off. “I never asked about your parents,” he said abruptly.

This was true. Angeal had never been the type to ask personal questions. But if anything gave him the right, Sephiroth forcing his way into the midst of Angeal’s grief for his own parent certainly must. “My mother was named Jenova,” he said; it was all he had ever been told of her. “She is dead. My father…” He pressed his lips together. “Is Hojo.” He’d never admitted it out loud before.

Angeal looked astonished. “I…don’t think he knows you know that.”

“He _hints_ ,” Sephiroth muttered. Hojo had never been even half as subtle as he thought he was.

 ** _Wait._ ** “How do _you_ know?”

If there was one thing Sephiroth knew he hated—there were in fact many—it was people knowing things about him he did not know himself. Learning to read upside-down had been a massive stride forward in his development of personal agency.

“Ah—Hollander told me, actually.” Angeal’s left shoulder twitched in a shrug, and he stared down at his hands. “He claims to be mine.”

Straightforward sympathy shot through Sephiroth’s chest. Hollander was a loathsome little troll—not actually a small man, objectively, but he had a craven character and was sufficiently shorter than Sephiroth to make no difference. He was considerably less hateful than Hojo, although possibly even less worthy of respect, but Angeal had the childhood memory of a beloved father whom he treasured. Sephiroth could scarcely imagine having that taken away.

But Angeal was from _Banora_ ; it shouldn’t even be a plausible claim. “How…” he said.

“Mom used to work for Shinra, it turns out. Before I was born.”

…and after he was born she had moved to a backwater in the South to take up a marginal career in laundry? That was a statistical departure from the behavior of Shinra personnel as a whole; Shinra might have faults as an employer but they did pay well. And outside departments like SOLDIER and the Turks, and the upper echelons of the executive hierarchy, where outside bonds were viewed as a distraction, having a family to support typically improved employee loyalty, and was considered desirable.

 _This_ then was what Angeal had asked his mother about. And she had responded with _suicide._

What on this Planet was going on. Of all people, Sephiroth had never expected there to be a mysterious conspiracy surrounding _Angeal._

“What did she do before she left?” he ventured.

The corners of Angeal’s mouth curled up, very slightly. A bitter expression which looked all wrong on him. “Lab assistant.”

Oh. _Oh._

Oh no.

“I see,” said Sephiroth.

“You do, don’t you.” Angeal’s smile widened, but remained a bloodless thing. It didn’t suit him. “I should have talked to you…sooner.”

Sephiroth narrowed his eyes. “Is there…” Anything he could do. Any more Angeal wanted to say. He wasn’t good at this.

Angeal shrugged. “It’s fine. Thanks.”

It wasn’t fine.

“Your mother…”

“She did what she thought was right.” Angeal closed his eyes, drew in a breath, opened them again. “I shouldn’t have put that kind of pressure on her. But she did what she thought was right. I can’t blame her for that.”

Sephiroth could, but since she had put herself beyond his reach he supposed that wasn’t useful.

“Always the same,” Angeal mused, staring through the wall again. “Dreams and honor.” He sounded like he wasn’t sure what they meant anymore. If his mother’s sense of honor had cost him her, Sephiroth was inclined to agree. And dreams were clearly determined to be no friends of Angeal’s.

“Mm. But what’s your alternative?” he asked drily. “Loveless?”

The smile that provoked was a lot more real, to Sephiroth’s pride. “A difficult decision,” Angeal agreed. “Genesis…” A shrug. “It works for him.”

Sephiroth was suddenly, sharply aware of how he didn’t have anything that ‘worked,’ the way Genesis had Loveless, the way Angeal had his family’s honor, his ridiculous potted plants. Whether such things were useful, whether he _needed_ one, was an open question, but he had nothing of his own to suggest, to propose as an alternative. Obviously there _were_ alternatives, obviously the world was full of people getting by on different conceptual bases, but he couldn’t bring a single one to mind just now. Unless you counted Hojo’s self-aggrandizing science, or the way the President’s life revolved around money and power.

He hummed agreeably.

“Hey,” said Angeal. Sephiroth flicked his eyes up to Angeal’s face affirm his attention was engaged.

“If you did try to destroy the world…would you want me to stop you?”

Sephiroth squinted. “Is this a trick question?”

Angeal squinted back at him. “No…?”

“Because if I were ‘trying to destroy the world’ I obviously _wouldn’t_ want you to stop me, or I wouldn’t be trying in the first place.”

“Pfff.” Humor animated Angeal’s face for a second before fading out, not quite completely. “No. I’m asking the you _right now_ about the course of action you prefer toward this hypothetical insane Sephiroth.”

“Ah.” Sephiroth paused to consider. Hypothetical exercises he could do, even bizarre ones. “Well, obviously he shouldn’t be permitted to continue. But, ah…" He paused again, this time looking for a delicate wording, which was not one of his strengths. “…I would recommend that you and Genesis bring a detachment of additional SOLDIERs, and be prepared to take casualties.”

They couldn’t take him, after all. They never had been able to, even when he _wasn’t_ trying to kill them.

He doubted he could kill _everyone in Midgar_ before being taken down, though. He was the best, not actually unstoppable.

Angeal snorted, and when Sephiroth looked, he was smiling again. “We kind of underestimated you, didn’t we,” he said. Reached for another slice of flatbread. It was getting cold, and the cheese topping had stiffened, but Angeal bit off the end of the triangle with great decisiveness. “That’s okay,” he said around the mouthful. “I just wanted to be sure.”

Sephiroth looked sidelong through his bangs. “I refuse to believe that if I’d said I preferred you to stand back and allow me to proceed, you’d listen. In the event it became relevant.”

“Ha. No. But it’s good for morale to know the real you would want me to stop you. If it happened.” Angeal stuffed his entire mouth full of about half the slice of food, and Sephiroth rolled his eyes.

“As long as your mind is set to rest on that front,” he said, only a little snippy.

Angeal shook his head. It took him several more seconds of chewing to be able to swallow enough flatbread to say, “You and Genesis are a lot alike sometimes.” This seemed to make him sad. But then, so did everything just now.

Why did Angeal’s morale need the assurance that Sephiroth was not the monster he had dreamed? Was it merely the things he and Genesis had done in the war, that Angeal had been happy to ignore for so long? If they were given such orders again, and Angeal was there to overhear and understand what _pacification_ was this time…would he try to stop them?

Angeal finished his cold flatbread, picked up the towel off the sofa—there was indeed a damp patch on the blue upholstery—and absently wiped his hands on it as he stood up. “Thanks for the food,” Angeal said. “And…for coming over. I…really didn’t expect it.”

“…you’ve been worrying us,” Sephiroth said. Not sure whether his actions required justification. “If you want to keep talking, that’s fine.”

“I think I’d sort of like to just…sleep,” Angeal replied, in a manner that suggested he had sat down on the sofa over twenty-four hours ago and not really moved until Sephiroth ordered him into the shower.

“Ah. Should I…go, then?” Standing guard in a living room would be new, but not a terrible inconvenience. Certainly a less challenging prospect than sitting with Angeal trying to figure out if there was a right thing to say. But you weren’t supposed to leave a grieving man alone…

A nod. “I’m okay,” Angeal said. “We’ll talk later.” He hesitated, as Sephiroth retrieved his gloves and stood up. “Want to spar tomorrow?”

“…just the two of us?” Sephiroth asked. It had been a while since anyone had seriously proposed fighting him solo, and it was the two-on-one duels against Angeal and Genesis staged to try to give him a challenge that had first pulled him truly into the orbit of their friendship.

Angeal quirked his eyebrows, where Genesis would probably have gotten huffy at being undervalued. “Yeah, why not? I need more practice, and it should be fun.”

Fighting Angeal wasn’t exactly _difficult_ , but it could be…fun, certainly. Anyway if it would help Angeal feel better, it would be fine spending a little while bored. An easy training match would be a _lot_ less challenging than keeping Angeal company this evening had been, and he would get some exercise if nothing else. “Alright,” Sephiroth said. It helped, he realized, to have the promise, to be leaving Angeal alone but not abandoned. “See you tomorrow.”

“Good night,” said Angeal, as Sephiroth let himself into the hall.

* * *

Angeal’s leave paperwork was submitted before midnight and processed sometime the next morning, but since it was for grief and not illness there was nothing stopping him from meeting Sephiroth at one of the training rooms on the 49th floor, during the daily lunch break. He looked the same as ever—the Hewley sword was on his back, and a Shinra-issue broadsword in his right hand. There was no sign he’d failed to go to sleep.

“Did you eat already?” Sephiroth asked as the door slid open, and Angeal rolled his eyes.

“I don’t actually need a _new_ mother, Sephiroth,” he said, and went ahead into the training room without waiting for a response.

Well, persisting would make him angry if he wasn’t yet; if his performance was notably poor Sephiroth could always lecture him about fighting in top form later.

“I had an idea,” Angeal said, once they were closed in the training room together and he’d started flicking through the VR options menu on his PHS.

Sephiroth brought his thumb down on a generic woodland glade, subtropical, no simulated opponents. “Mm?”

Angeal spun the broadsword in his hand and offered it, pommel first, to Sephiroth. Looked away from his phone and up along the weapon’s length when Sephiroth didn’t take it. “How about you use this,” he said. Tipped his head toward the heavy crossguard at his right shoulder. “And I’ll use this one, for once.”

Slowly, Sephiroth closed his hand around the hilt. Since acquiring the Masamune he’d never really used any other blade, but that had been only a few years ago and he’d originally trained with a SOLDIER’s standard weapons. This one had been in Angeal’s possession for long enough that there was a pattern of wear on the hilt matching his hand—a little broader than Sephiroth’s own. It was probably better-made than average, then, since Shinra’s mass-produced blades were often poorly tempered and prone to breaking. Even the good ones were less than sufficient to harness the full power of a SOLDIER.

It wasn’t enough of a handicap to make this even, but it would help.

“You’re not worried it will be damaged?” he asked, flicking his eyes toward the Hewley sword. _Use brings about wear, tear, and rust,_ he always said.

“Well, that is one reason I want you to train with something a little more fragile than your treasure-blade,” Angeal said easily, as he reached up and pulled his weapon free from its magnetic sheath. “But also,” he swung it around, as if feeling out the weight—he did kata with this weapon, Sephiroth had seen him, but it was probably different to be planning to actually fight with it. “It’s occurred to me that…something you can’t put to use because you’re so worried about damaging it…isn’t much good to anyone. If it can’t handle the consequences of existing in the world…then it might as well not exist.”

His eyes were distant. He sounded—wry, if not quite bitter. He might have been talking about his mother; he certainly was talking about more than just his sword.

“Angeal,” Sephiroth said. Stopped. Raised the standard-issue broadsword, instead.

He had always spoken best with a blade.

Angeal brought up his Buster—his preferred guard turned out to be different with a weapon this size, pulled back behind the right elbow as though for a charge rather than pointed into his opponent’s face, ready to deflect. Sephiroth had seen that stance from him before, but only when the terms of the challenge were that Sephiroth would only defend, not counterattack.

Was he serious? Like this, his entire torso was open, which would be fine if he were up against someone slower than himself, but Sephiroth had always been faster. A Barrier might make this a valid strategy, since Sephiroth was using an ordinary sword.

“Are you going to use materia?” he asked. Angeal didn’t often, especially in spars, but it wasn’t out of the question, either.

Angeal grinned. “We’ll see.”

‘We’ll see’ apparently meant ‘if I decide I need it,’ because a few minutes into the duel Angeal knocked him off-balance with an Ice spell erupting from underfoot and then took advantage of the fact that, for once, he had about half a meter more reach to go for Sephiroth’s abdomen.

He wasn’t worried about actually being gutted, even before the blade passed a centimeter short of him and merely clipped the edge of his coat, because he trusted both Angeal and his own skills, but it was disconcerting, this change in style.

Not just the addition of casting, which Angeal had always used sparsely enough that if he had been any less excellent at every other aspect of SOLDIER duty he might not have made First, but the way Angeal had begun rotating his sword technique, switching with little warning between first a version of his familiar conservative forward-center style, with its strong guard and focus on opening an opponent up for a targeted strike, modified only for the size of the blade, then next back into the oddly open style he’d begun the fight with, clearly designed to take full advantage of the heavy Buster-style weapon, and _not_ designed to keep the user safe.

Sephiroth could have landed half a dozen likely-mortal blows already, but had entirely passed up several of the openings because Angeal would almost certainly have landed a stroke on him in return. This new recklessness with his own wellbeing could not possibly be a good sign—why had he not made time this morning to track down a book on the grieving process?

For all that, Angeal wasn’t falling short—in fact, in some ways Sephiroth didn’t think he’d ever seen him fight so well. It might have been the better sword, though at that size it should have _lessened_ the variety of options available. How had Angeal’s ancestors used the thing at all, without enhanced strength?

The natural thing was to assume that Angeal’s size ran in the family and the Hewleys had all been powerfully built, but that niggling awareness that perhaps Hollander hadn’t been lying, that Angeal might have no relation to the family that had left him that legacy…

The Buster sword clanged against his broadsword, inches from his face. “Getting distracted?” Angeal asked from behind his slab of steel. His eyes were bright.

Getting distracted by your _opponent’s_ personal problems was ridiculous. “I’m so bored my mind is starting to wander,” Sephiroth retorted, and shoved hard enough to send Angeal back several steps.

He loved Masamune, but he had to admit there were things he’d missed about wielding a smaller weapon. Footwork was more relevant, for one thing, which meant there was more call for effort even if you weren’t actually being _challenged_.

Minimal effort was a good standard in battle, it maximized stamina, it wasn’t just a matter of pride to him, whatever Genesis thought. But sometimes you wanted to...have some fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Judiciousness is one of Angeal's strengths, as is loyalty, but holding on too hard to everything was also his fatal flaw. I like this; Angeal had the most classic tragic arc of everyone in Crisis Core.
> 
> Sephiroth refuses to learn the name of pizza because arbitrarily looking down on things is one of his coping mechanisms and 'unfamiliar junk food' is an easy target. ;D


End file.
